Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson

by William Wordsworth; Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson

NOTES

OENONE

"The poem of Oenone is the first of Tennyson's elaborate essays in a metre over which be afterwards obtained an eminent command. It is also the first of his idylls and of his classical studies, with their melodious rendering of the Homeric epithets and the composite words, which Tennyson had the art of coining after the Greek manner ('lily-cradled,' 'river-sundered,' 'dewy-dashed') for compact description or ornament. Several additions were made in a later edition; and the corrections then made show with what sedulous care the poet diversified the structure of his lines, changing the pauses that break the monotonous run of blank verse, and avoiding the use of weak terminals when the line ends in the middle of a sentence. The opening of the poem was in this manner decidedly improved; yet one may judge that the finest passages are still to be found almost as they stood in the original version; and the concluding lines, in which the note of anguish culminates, are left untouched."

"Nevertheless the blank verse of Oenone lacks the even flow and harmonious balance of entire sections in the Morte d'Arthur or Ulysses, where the lines are swift or slow, rise to a point and fall gradually, in cadences arranged to correspond with the dramatic movement, showing that the poet has extended and perfected his metrical resources. The later style is simplified; he has rejected cumbrous metaphor; he is less sententious; he has pruned away the flowery exuberance and lightened the sensuous colour of his earlier composition."—Sir Alfred Lyall.

First published in 1832-3. It received its present improved form in the edition of 1842. The story of Paris and Oenone may be read in Lempriere, or in any good classical dictionary. Briefly it is as follows:—Paris was the son of Priam, King of Troy, and Hecuba. It was foretold that he would bring great ruin on Troy, so his father ordered him to be slain at birth. The slave, however, did not destroy him, but exposed him upon Mount Ida, where shepherds found him and, brought him up as one of themselves. "He gained the esteem of all the shepherds, and his graceful countenance and manly development recommended him to the favour of Oenone, a nymph of Ida, whom he married, and with whom he lived in the most perfect tenderness. Their conjugal bliss was soon disturbed. At the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, Eris, the goddess of discord, who had not been invited to partake of the entertainment, showed her displeasure by throwing into the assembly of gods, who were at the celebration of the nuptials, a golden apple on which were written the words Detur pulchriori. All the goddesses claimed it as their own: the contention at first became general, but at last only three, Juno (Herè), Venus (Aphrodite), and Minerva (Pallas), wished to dispute their respective right to beauty. The gods, unwilling to become arbiters in an affair of so tender and delicate a nature, appointed Paris to adjudge the prize of beauty to the fairest of the goddesses, and indeed the shepherd seemed properly qualified to decide so great a contest, as his wisdom was so well established, and his prudence and sagacity so well known. The goddesses appeared before their judge without any covering or ornament, and each tried by promises and entreaties to gain the attention of Paris, and to influence his judgment. Juno promised him a kingdom; Minerva, military glory; and Venus, the fairest woman in the world for his wife." (Lempriere.) Paris accorded the apple to Aphrodite, abandoned Oenone, and after he had been acknowledged the son of Priam went to Sparta, where he persuaded Helen, the wife of Menelaus, to flee with him to Troy. The ten years' siege, and the destruction of Troy, resulted from this rash act. Oenone's significant words at the close of the poem foreshadow this disaster. Tennyson, in his old age concluded the narrative in the poem called The Death of Oenone. According to the legend Paris, mortally wounded by one of the arrows of Philoctetes, sought out the abandoned Oenone that she might heal him of his wound. But he died before he reached her, "and the nymph, still mindful of their former loves, threw herself upon his body, and stabbed herself to the heart, after she had plentifully bathed it with her tears." Tennyson follows another tradition in which Paris reaches Oenone, who scornfully repels him. He passed onward through the mist, and dropped dead upon the mountain side. His old shepherd playmates built his funeral pyre. Oenone follows the yearning in her heart to where her husband lies, and dies in the flames that consume him.

In Chapter IV of Mr. Stopford Brooke's Tennyson, there is a valuable commentary upon Oenone. He deals first with the imaginative treatment of the landscape, which is characteristic of all Tennyson's classical poems, and instances the remarkable improvement effected in the descriptive passages in the volume of 1842. "But fine landscape and fine figure re-drawing are not enough to make a fine poem. Human interest, human passion, must be greater than Nature, and dominate the subject. Indeed, all this lovely scenery is nothing in comparison with the sorrow and love of Oenone, recalling her lost love in the places where once she lived in joy. This is the main humanity of the poem. But there is more. Her common sorrow is lifted almost into the proportions of Greek tragedy by its cause and by its results. It is caused by a quarrel in Olympus, and the mountain nymph is sacrificed without a thought to the vanity of the careless gods. That is an ever-recurring tragedy in human history. Moreover, the personal tragedy deepens when we see the fateful dread in Oenone's heart that she will, far away, in time hold her lover's life in her hands, and refuse to give it back to him—a fatality that Tennyson treated before he died. And, secondly, Oenone's sorrow is lifted into dignity by the vast results which flowed from its cause. Behind it were the mighty fates of Troy, the ten years' battle, the anger of Achilles, the wanderings of Ulysses, the tragedy of Agamemnon, the founding of Rome, and the three great epics of the ancient world."

Another point of general interest is to be noted in the poem. Despite the classical theme the tone is consistently modern, as may be gathered from the philosophy of the speech of Pallas, and from the tender yielding nature of Oenone. There is no hint here of the vindictive resentment which the old classical writers, would have associated with her grief. Similarly Tennyson has systematically modernised the Arthurian legend in the Idylls of the King, giving us nineteenth century thoughts in a conventional mediaeval setting.

A passage from Bayne, puts this question clearly: "Oenone wails melodiously for Paris without the remotest suggestion of fierceness or revengeful wrath. She does not upbraid him for having preferred to her the fairest and most loving wife in Greece, but wonders how any one could love him better than she does. A Greek poet would have used his whole power of expression to instil bitterness into her resentful words. The classic legend, instead of representing Oenone as forgiving Paris, makes her nurse her wrath throughout all the anguish and terror of the Trojan War. At its end, her Paris comes back to her. Deprived of Helen, a broken and baffled man, he returns from the ruins of his native Troy, and entreats Oenone to heal him of a wound, which, unless she lends her aid, must be mortal. Oenone gnashes her teeth at him, refuses him the remedy, and lets him die. In the end, no doubt, she falls into remorse, and kills herself—this is quite in the spirit of classic legend; implacable vengeance, soul-sickened with its own victory, dies in despair. That forgiveness of injuries could be anything but weakness—that it could be honourable, beautiful, brave—is an entirely Christian idea; and it is because this idea, although it has not yet practically conquered the world, although it has indeed but slightly modified the conduct of nations, has nevertheless secured recognition as ethically and socially right, that Tennyson could not hope to enlist the sympathy and admiration of his readers for his Oenone, if he had cast her image in the tearless bronze of Pagan obduracy."

1. IDA. A mountain range in Mysia, near Troy. The scenery is, in part, idealised, and partly inspired by the valley of Cauteretz. See Introduction, p. xvi.

2. IONIAN. Ionia was the district adjacent to Mysia. 'Ionian,' therefore, is equivalent to 'neighbouring.'

10. TOPMOST GARGARUS. A Latinism, cf. summus mons.

12. TROAS. The Troad (Troas) was the district surrounding Troy.

ILION=Ilium, another name for Troy.

14. CROWN=chief ornament.

22-23. O MOTHER IDA—DIE. Mr. Stedman, in his Victorian Poets, devotes a valuable chapter to the discussion of Tennyson's relation to Theocritus, both in sentiment and form. "It is in the Oenone that we discover Tennyson's earliest adaptation of that refrain, which was a striking beauty of the pastoral elegiac verse;

"'O mother Ida, hearken ere I die,'

"is the analogue of (Theocr. II).

"'See thou; whence came my love, O lady Moon,' etc.

"Throughout the poem the Syracusan manner and feeling are strictly and nobly maintained." Note, however, the modernisation already referred to.

MOTHER IDA. The Greeks constantly personified Nature, and attributed a separate individual life to rivers, mountains, etc. Wordsworth's Excursion, Book IV., might be read in illustration, especially from the line beginning—

"Once more to distant ages of the world."

MANY-FOUNTAIN'D IDA. Many streams took their source in Ida. Homer applies the same epithet to this mountain.

24-32. These lines are in imitation of certain passages from Theocritus. See Stedman, Victorian Poets, pp. 213 f. They illustrate Tennyson's skill in mosaic work.

30. MY EYES—LOVE. Cf. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI. ii. 3. 17:

"Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of grief."

36. COLD CROWN'D SNAKE. "Cold crown'd" is not a compound epithet, meaning "with a cold head." Each adjective marks a particular quality. Crown'd has reference to the semblance of a coronet that the hoods of certain snakes, such as cobras, possess.

37. THE DAUGHTER OF A RIVER-GOD. Oenone was the daughter of the river Cebrenus in Phrygia.

39-40. AS YONDER WALLS—BREATHED. The walls of Troy were built by Poseidon (Neptune) and Apollo, whom Jupiter had condemned to serve King Laomedon of Troas for a year. The stones were charmed into their places by the breathing of Apollo's flute, as the walls of Thebes are said to have risen to the strain of Amphion's lyre. Compare Tithonus, 62-63:

"Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
When Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers."

And cf. also The Princess, iii. 326.

42-43. THAT—WOE. Compare In Memoriam, V.

50. WHITE HOOVED. Cf. "hooves" for hoofs, in the Lady of Shalott, l. 101.

51. SIMOIS. One of the many streams flowing from Mount Ida.

65. HESPERIAN GOLD. The fruit was in colour like the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides. The Hesperides were three (or four) nymphs, the daughters of Hesperus. They dwelt in the remotest west, near Mount Atlas in Africa, and were appointed to guard the golden apples which Herè gave to Zeus on the day of their marriage. One of Hercules' twelve labours was to procure some of these apples. See the articles Hesperides and Hercules in Lempriere.

66. SMELT AMBROSIALLY. Ambrosia was the food of the gods. Their drink was nectar. The food was sweeter than honey, and of most fragrant odour.

72. WHATEVER OREAD. A classical construction. The Oreads were mountain nymphs.

78. FULL-FACED—GODS. This means either that not a face was missing, or refers to the impressive countenances of the gods. Another possible interpretation is that all their faces were turned full towards the board on which the apple was cast. Compare for this epithet Lotos Eaters, 7; and Princess, ii. 166.

79. PELEUS. All the gods, save Eris, were present at the marriage between Peleus and Thetis, a sea-deity. In her anger Eris threw upon the banquet-table the apple which Paris now holds in his hand. Peleus and Thetis were the parents of the famous Achilles.

81. IRIS. The messenger of the gods. The rainbow is her symbol.

83. DELIVERING=announcing.

89-100. These lines, and the opening lines of the poem are among the best of Tennyson's blank verse lines, and therefore among the best that English poetry contains. The description owes some of its beauty to Homer. In its earlier form, in the volume of 1832-3, it is much less perfect.

132. A CRESTED PEACOCK. The peacock was sacred to Herè (Juno).

103. A GOLDEN CLOUD. The gods were wont to recline upon Olympus beneath a canopy of golden clouds.

104. DROPPING FRAGRANT DEW. Drops of glittering dew fell from the golden cloud which shrouded Herè and Zeus. See Iliad, XIV, 341 f.

105 f. Herè was the queen of Heaven. Power was therefore the gift which she naturally proffered.

114. Supply the ellipsis.

121-122. POWER FITTED—WISDOM. Power that adapts itself to every crisis; power which is born of wisdom and enthroned by wisdom (i.e. does not owe its supremacy to brute strength).

121-122. FROM ALL-ALLEGIANCE. Note the ellipsis and the inversion.

128-131. WHO HAVE ATTAINED—SUPREMACY. Cf. Lotos Eaters, l. 155 f, and Lucretius, 104-108.

The gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans.

137. O'ERTHWARTED WITH=crossed by.

142 f. Compare the tone of Pallas' speech with what has been said in the introduction, p. liv f., concerning Tennyson's love of moderation and restraint, and his belief in the efficacy of law.

Compare also the general temper of the Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington, and especially ll. 201-205.

144—148. Yet these qualities are not bestowed with power as the end in view. Power will come without seeking when these great principles of conduct are observed. The main thing is to live and act by the law of the higher Life,—and it is the part of wisdom to follow right for its own sake, whatever the consequences may be.

151. SEQUEL OF GUERDON. To follow up my words with rewards (such as Herè proffers) would not make me fairer.

153-164. Pallas reads the weakness of Paris's character, but disdains to offer him a more worldly reward. An access of moral courage will be her sole gift to him, so that he shall front danger and disaster until his powers of endurance grow strong with action, and his full-grown will having passed through all experiences, and having become a pure law unto itself, shall be commensurate with perfect freedom, i.e., shall not know that it is circumscribed by law.

This is the philosophy that we find in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty.

Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens, through thee,
are fresh and strong.

165-167. Note how dramatic this interruption is.

170. IDALIAN APHRODITE. Idalium was a town in Cyprus; an island where the goddess was especially worshipped. She was frequently called Cypria or the Cyprian.

171. FRESH AS THE FOAM. Aphrodite was born from the waves of the sea, near the Island of Cyprus.

NEW-BATHED IN PAPHIAN WELLS. Paphos was a town in Cyprus. Aphrodite was said to have landed at Paphos after her birth from the sea-foam. She is sometimes called the Paphian or Paphia on this account.

184. SHE SPOKE AND LAUGH'D. Homer calls her "the laughter-loving Aphrodite."

195-l97. A WILD—WEED. The influence of beauty upon the beasts is a common theme with poets. Cf. Una and the lion in Spenser's Faery Queen.

204. THEY CUT AWAY MY TALLEST PINES. Evidently to make ships for Paris's expedition to Greece.

235-240. THERE ARE—DIE. Lamartine in Le Lac (written before 1820) has a very similar passage.

250. CASSANDRA. The daughter of King Priam, and therefore the sister of Paris. She had the gift of prophecy.

260. A FIRE DANCES. Signifying the burning of Troy.

THE EPIC AND MORTE D'ARTHUR

First published, with the epilogue as here printed, in 1842. The Morte d'Arthur was subsequently taken out of the present setting, and with substantial expansion appeared as the final poem of the Idylls of the King, with the new title, The Passing of Arthur.

Walter Savage Landor doubtless refers to the Morte d'Arthur as early as 1837, when writing to a friend, as follows:—"Yesterday a Mr. Moreton, a young man of rare judgment, read to me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson, being different in style from his printed poems. The subject is the Death of Arthur. It is more Homeric than any poem of our time, and rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea." A still earlier composition is assured by the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald who writes that, in 1835, while staying at the Speddings in the Lake Country, he met Tennyson and heard the poet read the Morte d'Arthur and other poems of the 1842 volume. They were read out of a MS., "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night 'when all the house was mute.'"

In The Epic we have specific reference to the Homeric influence in these lines:

"Nay, nay," said Hall,
"Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth," . . .

Critics have agreed for the most part in considering the Morte d'Arthur as the most Homeric of Tennyson's poems. Bayne writes: "Not only in the language is it Homeric, but in the design and manner of treatment. The concentration of interest on the hero, the absence of all modernism in the way of love, story or passion painting, the martial clearness, terseness, brevity of the narrative, with definite specification, at the same time, are exquisitely true to the Homeric pattern." Brimley notes, with probably greater precision, that: "They are rather Virgilian than Homeric echoes; elaborate and stately, not naive and eager to tell their story; rich in pictorial detail; carefully studied; conscious of their own art; more anxious for beauty of workmanship than interest of action."

It has frequently been pointed out in this book how prone Tennyson is to regard all his subjects from the modern point of view:

a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day.

The Epic and the epilogue strongly emphasize this modernity in the varied modern types of character which they represent, with their diverse opinions upon contemporary topics. "As to the epilogue," writes Mr. Brooke (p. 130), "it illustrates all I have been saying about Tennyson's method with subjects drawn from Greek or romantic times. He filled and sustained those subjects with thoughts which were as modern as they were ancient. While he placed his readers in Camelot, Ithaca, or Ida, he made them feel also that they were standing in London, Oxford, or an English woodland. When the Morte d'Arthur is finished, the hearer of it sits rapt. There were 'modern touches here and there,' he says, and when he sleeps he dreams of

"King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of stateliest port; and all the people cried,
'Arthur is come again, he cannot die.'
Then those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated—'Come again, and thrice as fair:'
And, further inland, voices echoed—'Come
With all good things and war shall be no more.

"The old tale, thus modernised in an epilogue, does not lose its dignity, for now the recoming of Arthur is the recoming of Christ in a wider and fairer Christianity. We feel here how the new movement of religion and theology had sent its full and exciting wave into Tennyson. Arthur's death in the battle and the mist is the death of a form of Christianity which, exhausted, died in doubt and darkness. His advent as a modern gentleman is the coming of a brighter and more loving Christ into the hearts of men. For so ends the epilogue. When the voices cry, 'Come again, with all good things,'

"At this a hundred bells began to peal,
That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed,
The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn."

THE ALLEGORICAL ELEMENT.—The statement is made on p. xxxv of this book that in The Idylls of the King "the effort is made to reconcile the human story with the allegory, and in consequence the issues are confusedly presented to our mind." It is characteristic of the Morte d'Arthur fragment that it is apparently free from all allegorical intention. It is merely a moving human story with a fascinating element of mystery inspired by the original Celtic legend. An element of allegory lies in the epilogue, and The Passing of Arthur still further enforces the allegorical purpose. But here, as Mr. Brooke again writes (p. 371), "we are close throughout to the ancient tale. No allegory, no ethics, no rational soul, no preaching symbolism, enter here, to dim, confuse, or spoil the story. Nothing is added which does not justly exalt the tale, and what is added is chiefly a greater fulness and breadth of humanity, a more lovely and supreme Nature, arranged at every point to enhance into keener life the human feelings of Arthur and his knight, to lift the ultimate hour of sorrow and of death into nobility. Arthur is borne to a chapel nigh the field—

"A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land;
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

"What a noble framework—and with what noble consciousness it is drawn! . . . . All the landscape—than which nothing better has been invented by any English poet—lives from point to point as if Nature herself had created it; but even more alive than the landscape are the two human figures in it—Sir Bedivere standing by the great water, and Arthur lying wounded near the chapel, waiting for his knight. Take one passage, which to hear is to see the thing:

"So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept,
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang
Shrill, chill with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.

"Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks: 'What hast thou seen, what heard?' Bedivere answers:

"'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag,'

"—lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns that I never stand in solitude beside their waters but I hear the verses in my heart. At the last he throws it.

"The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.

"'So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur,' and never yet in poetry did any sword, flung in the air, flash so superbly.

"The rest of the natural description is equally alive, and the passage where the sound echoes the sense, and Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs as he moves among the icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting, clashing sound as any to be found in Tennyson:

"Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rung
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.

"We hear all the changes on the vowel a—every sound of it used to give the impression—and then, in a moment, the verse runs into breadth, smoothness and vastness: for Bedivere comes to the shore and sees the great water;

"And on a sudden lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon,

"in which the vowel o, in its changes is used, as the vowel a has been used before.

"The questions and replies of Arthur and Bedivere, the reproaches of the King, the excuses of the Knight, the sorrow and the final wrath of Arthur, are worthy of the landscape, as they ought to be; and the dominance of the human element in the scene is a piece of noble artist-work. Arthur is royal to the close, and when he passes away with the weeping Queens across the mere, unlike the star of the tournament he was of old, he is still the King. Sir Bedivere, left alone on the freezing shore, hears the King give his last message to the world. It is a modern Christian who speaks, but the phrases do not sound out of harmony with that which might be in Romance. Moreover, the end of the saying is of Avilion or Avalon—of the old heathen Celtic place where the wounded are healed and the old made young."

In the final analysis, therefore, the significance of the Morte d'Arthur is a significance of beauty rather than moralistic purpose. It has been said that the reading of Milton's Lycidas is the surest test of one's powers of poetical appreciation. I fear that the test is too severe for many readers who can still enjoy a simpler style of poetry. But any person who can read the Morte d'Arthur, and fail to be impressed by its splendid pictures, and subdued to admiration by the dignity of its language, need scarcely hope for pleasure from any poetry.